Wagyu restaurants in New York, New York

New York is where the formats live. Seventy-five of its restaurants publish here and twenty-two clear the full sourcing standard, four ahead of Dallas, and the count is the least interesting thing about the city. Dallas is a steakhouse market that happens to serve Wagyu. New York has the smallest steakhouse share of any large market covered, eight of the twenty-two against twelve of sixteen in Las Vegas and eleven of eighteen in Dallas, and the rest are rooms where Wagyu arrives some other way entirely.

Count the ways you can eat it. Eight of the twenty-two sell it by the ounce, three run yakiniku, three serve it as shabu-shabu, two offer it all you can eat, five are omakase counters including one built entirely around Wagyu, and there is a teppanyaki room and hot stone service. Nowhere else on this site offers that spread, and the formats are not interchangeable: yakiniku and shabu-shabu use thin slices where the marbling renders in seconds, while a steakhouse cut asks the fat to hold together under heat. All-you-can-eat Wagyu sounds like a contradiction and is not, because it is yakiniku by the slice rather than steak by the pound.

It is also easier to eat here without the top price tier than in the other big steak markets. Three of the twenty-two verified rooms sit below it, against one of eighteen in Dallas and none at all in Las Vegas. Ten of the twenty-two hold a licence on the official Kobe Beef Association registry and eight carry the Certified Kobe badge, which needs the licence and Kobe on the menu we read. The two that hold the licence without the badge were serving other prefectures when we last looked, which is exactly the gap the badge exists to mark. Several rooms here name the individual Japanese farm rather than only the prefecture, which is a step finer than most cities manage. The fifty-three remaining published venues advertise Wagyu without showing where it came from, and are listed separately below.